The War Machine
Matthew 25:1-13 A scientist said to me recently that everything is a machine, everything is mechanical. Just think about it. The whole of reality is nothing but a vast system which happens. I did want to ask questions. Are human beings machines? In the world of AI is everything going to become more and more mechanistic?
As I was thinking about today’s talk I was thinking about war, about the war machine. Have you noticed that politicians now tell us that a major war is somehow inevitable. We must, they say, spend more money on defence, on the machinery of war, because war is definitely on its way. There is something about war. We think about it as if it is an inevitable and terrible fact of life. War happens to us and the arms industry is happy for us to let war happen to us. War and human nature are often made to seem to be the same thing.
So, there is in us something mechanical. In that sense the scientist was onto something. Just think how reactive we are. Somebody says something to you and you react aggressively. Somebody doesn’t say something to you and you react aggressively. Somebody looks at you in a certain way and you react aggressively. Take a look at your heart. Doesn’t it sometimes feel to you as if your heart is a bomb waiting to explode? The heart is teeming with all this anger and resentment and envy and spite and violence. There is something about our hearts. They are weapons waiting for a war so as to fully ignite. Next time you find somebody doing or saying something which makes you furious try and notice what happens to you at that moment. You become unconscious, it’s like falling asleep. You react.
‘As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept.’ The foolish and wise bridesmaids all fall asleep. We fall into a strange kind of waking sleep which is called everyday consciousness where we are furiously reactive all the time. When we are most unconscious, we are most mechanical. The living spirit is not in us when we angrily retort or nurse a grievance for many years.
The tragic modern wars around us, in Sudan, in the Middle East, in the Ukraine, are terrible examples of what happens to humanity when it is manipulated by unscrupulous war leaders, when aggression is given a narrative. These wars are examples of humanity at its least conscious and aware. The war machine sacrifices humanity in the form of soldiers and civilians, and we think it is a normal state of affairs because we ourselves are so full of our own aggression, our own vengeance. This is, we say, just the way the world is. Of course, it is right to honour those who bravely gave their lives in war, as we do today, but it is also right to refuse to take war as a regrettable status-quo. At heart we are not machines. We are living souls, but we need desperately to wake up. Jesus says at the end of the parable, ‘Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.’ What might it mean? This keeping awake? This not going to sleep?
We could say it starts with us, this difficult waking up. What are we waking up from? Waking up from our normal state of consciousness, our normal state of being. This normal state of consciousness is where we are waiting and ready to attack and defend, where we carry years of pain and grievance. We are attempting to wake up from our primal war-like state. Think how easily we are offended. How we partly want to be offended all the time. How easily we feel slighted or left out or unacknowledged. Think about the epic grudges we construct and carry over time and lovingly tend and polish. Now the kingdom of heaven is a state of being where we wake up out of this long, bitter sleep of grievance. In the kingdom of heaven, we are not reactive machines. We are awakening living souls. It is a fearful condition but we are fearfully and wonderfully alive because we are not carrying around all this weight of pain and grievance.
Life, as it comes at us, can be treated as an enemy, as a force which we react against, or it can be treated as a way of waking up. ‘When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps.’
If we keep our lamps fuelled, we are essentially staying awake, we are creating illumination rather than darkness. The real challenge is keeping awake and conscious, keeping that sense of divine possibility alive, when you face realities which want to drag you back into old reactive patterns. Think about those situations of growing tension which are leading you ever more deeply into aggressive reactivity, you can feel the tension tightening in the body, you can feel ever less space inside you. It is at exactly such a point where you need to become more fully human, more creative, and less mechanical and defensive. It is at such a point where you need to be a living soul and not a reactive machine.
It may seem like a small thing, working on yourself, in the power of the spirit, to be more fully awake and conscious in the flux of life. But if we can resist that deep pull of anger inside us, if we can resist that need to be right, if we can meet conflict with consciousness, we will have gone some of the way to proving that scientist friend wrong. We are not machines, we don’t have to react in the same way again and again and again, war is not inevitable. We can slowly wake up, we can slowly be transformed.
We can work for a world where we go to the wedding banquet instead of going to war. The Reverend Ben Brown
